Category: Politics

A few years ago, Zimbabwe was a major food exporter, and one of the few African economic success stories. Its president, Robert Mugabe, saw that white Zimbabweans (most of whom had lived there for generations) were largely responsible for this success, and he wanted his black countrymen to be more prosperous.
So he immediately implemented free-market legal reforms, including an anti-corruption campaign to secure private property. He worked with religious and tribal leaders to gain their support, emphasizing education and entrepreneurship as the keys to prosperity, along with the virtues of hard work, honesty, and looking out for one’s community.
Kidding! Mugabe got armed bands of thugs to throw the white farmers off of their land. Those farms, which don’t magically sprout crops but require hard work and planning, don’t grow much food anymore. Now 200,000 people are facing starvation, according to Catholic Archbishop Pius Ncumbe.
But despite Mugabe’s responsibility for the deaths of thousands of black Africans so far, with thousands more to come, the international Left has largely been silent. Why? Because Mugabe is one of their fellow loons, attending international conferences to denounce their favorite targets:

“Must we allow [Bush and Blair], the two unholy men of our millennium, who in the same way as Hitler and Mussolini formed [an] unholy alliance, form an alliance to attack an innocent country?” asked Mr Mugabe, apparently referring to Iraq.

And this was at a food summit! While his countrymen are going hungry because he blew up his own economy simply to stir up racial resentment! Imagine if a white dictator caused mass hunger on this scale, with thousands of Africans facing death? Would he be invited to any fancypants international conferences?
The racialist modern Left is always willing to cut murderous dictators lots of slack — just as long as the dictators are Darker People, and regardless of whether Darker People are the ones watching their kids die for lack of food. This demonstrates that Leftists are motivated primarily by hatred of the West and capitalism, and the United States most of all. When they encounter someone who shares their hatreds, they will look the other way, even when innocent people are killed and oppressed.
Postscript: A bishop named “Pius Ncumbe” must be a total badass.

Congratulations to Warsaw mayor Lech Kaczynski!

Remember Senator John Edwards (D-Prell)? Okay, probably not. He was the guy who lost the presidential election along with that other guy, you know…the one with the gray bouffant hairdo and obnoxious wife.
Anyway, before running on the Al Qaeda Proxy Candidate ticket, Senator Edwards ran for the Democratic presidential nomination. He told voters that there are “Two Americas,” one with gold plated toilets, the other with no indoor plumbing, one that shops at Tiffany’s, the other that can’t afford to shop at Wal-Mart, etc. This clumsy quasi-Marxist theme didn’t play well, even with hard-core Democrats, who, if they believed in the death penalty, would limit its use to anyone making over $200,000 a year.
Nevertheless, without so much as a self-serving press release, John Edwards took a look at both Americas, and decided that the leather seats and martinis of Rich America looked better than the folding chairs and Pabst Blue Ribbon in Poor America. He’s joining a private investment group so he can “[develop] investment opportunities worldwide and strategic advice on global economic issues.”
Edwards was worth about $50 million when he ran for VP eleven months ago, so it’s not like he needs the money. The BusinessWeek article notes that other politicians have gone into the financial sector, but none of the examples they list had ever run on a haves vs. have-nots agenda before doing so.
Democrats say they’re for “social justice,” which is why far too many Catholics buy their rhetoric and vote for them. But that platitude translates into sordid things like racial set-asides and massive income transfers from working families to the often-undeserving elderly. And for all their talk about compassion for the “little guy,” when it comes to the littlest guys at all — babies in the womb — they have no compassion at all.
Bravo for John Edwards: he isn’t going to pretend to work for the wretched and the oppressed. He’s going to make buckets full of money and throw them on his pile. At least Jimmy Carter has done some demonstrably good things in his well-deserved retirement.
There are plenty of sleazy Republicans, too, but at least under their policies, we get to keep at least a little more of our money, and nobody ends up dead.

Pope Benedict won’t be voting in the German elections today. As Deutsche Welle puts it,
“Sundays are bad, because I kind of have to run a major world religion.”

The Mayor of New Orleans is disgruntled and understandably so. But before he starts complaining about the response of outside agencies, perhaps he should reflect on mistakes right in his own administration. He didn’t declare evacuation mandatory until Sunday, when the system was already moving in over the city.
In a critical failure of the city’s preparation, it appears the police have no communication infrastructure, and thus no command-and-control system for organizing their activities. One division of police even evacuated to Baton Rouge!
All in all, I think this has been a learning experience for the mayor.
Update: Good news: computer guys running an ISP on the scene report “no visible looting” today.
2nd update: The mayor’s relieved now that the Army’s on the scene with a take-charge general at the head of the operation.